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Springtime on Mars: Stories

The stories in Susan Woodring's debut collection SPRINGTIME ON MARS are full of wit and charm and establish Woodring as a writer full of great promise. One to watch.
Elissa Schappell, Tin House editor and the author of BLUE PRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS

Most contemporary short fiction is thin and weak like bad soup, and it leaves you starving. Then here comes Susan Woodring, with this great feast of a book! She tears the roof off of traditional domestic fiction and shows us everything that lives inside the walls of those proper houses. If there's a better book of short stories published this year, I'll eat it for breakfast and be glad of the chance to do so.
Pinckney Benedict, author of MIRACLE BOY

In these deceptively commonplace stories of husbands and wives, parents and children, neighbors and friends, Susan Woodring strips away the veneer of normalcy to show the startling mysteriousness of everyday American life. Springtime on Mars is hard to put down and even harder to forget.
Luke Whisnant, author of DOWN IN THE FLOOD

Amid a miasma of competent new short fictions either about the usual things or so rigorous in their objective to be nonobjective art that they are about that, Woodring crafts stories resolute enough to depose neat connotative meaning with a heuristic indeterminacy inherent in her love and respect for characters in transition from one uncertainty to the next. Often, from smack in the middle of the settled lives of families, they enter through one kind of knowledge or another into revealed vulnerability. It’s enough for them only to find their ways around the lack of discernable meaning in the events of their lives, and in that accomplishment we might find a particularly contemporary sense of their heroism and our own.These stories refresh us with what is important about the art of fiction writing. They are inspirational in the sense that they give readers reason to keep reading and writers reason to keep writing.
William Ryan, author and editor of turnrow